duVoyage - Fondation Groupama Gan pour le Cinéma

Almost thirteen years after your first album, Moon Safari, you’ve put your name to the soundtrack
of the colourised version of A Trip to the Moon. In what way are these two lunar expeditions connected?
Nicolas Godin: Moon Safari corresponds, for us, to a period of innocence: we were starting out, we weren’t
thinking in career terms. In a way, the images of A Trip to the Moon revived that lost innocence in us. They’re
part of our unconscious: we don’t remember when we saw them for the first time, but we just know that they
marked us – I especially remember a video by the Smashing Pumpkins which used extracts from the film,
which bowled me over, in the 1990s. Seeing these images again to set them to music took us way back to the
world of childhood.
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Between Moon Safari and the original soundtrack of A Trip to the Moon, we learned how to
compose for images. Our music, in its beginnings, was very pop; it’s become more experimental over time.
From Virgin Suicides to Quartier lointain, all your original soundtracks are about voyages in time
and in space. This is the case again with A Trip to the Moon…
Nicolas Godin: For each album, we take the listener by the hand and lead him somewhere. That’s what music
does. We have no other pretensions than that.
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Travel helps the mind to open, to change. Our music has the same ambition: to affect
the body and the mind. Our role is similar to Madame Thuillier’s, who coloured Méliès’ film, or to role of rock
musicians who played live in cinema theatres during a showing: it’s about prolonging the experience of film
by stimulating the spectator’s brain. We don’t make rock music but psycho-acoustic music, ambience. That’s
why our music works so well for voyages, and original soundtracks.
You had less than twenty days to write and record the soundtrack. How did the recording sessions go?
Nicolas Godin: The music gushed out very quickly, as if we’d been nurturing it for a life-time. Méliès’ universe
belongs to the world’s collective memory: the image of the moon with the rocket in its eye is anchored in each
one of us. This film has come through decades with its evocative power intact.
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Méliès laid the base for several generations of film-makers, set decorators, creators of
special effects – in the same way as the Beatles defined the pop format in the 1960s. Had the definitions of
Méliès or of the Beatles been different, cinema or music would have been radically different.
Your soundtrack is striking for its great synchronicity with the images of Méliès: each sound gives
rhythm, stress, or punctuation to the action of the film. Drum and percussion play a dominant role…
Nicolas Godin: We had great freedom compared to our previous experience of composing for images. For once,
since the director is dead, there was nobody above us telling us what to do: we were able to work with each
image, because we knew that everything we recorded would be preserved in the film. We played facing the
screen, to synchronise the music better – which caused a bit of neck ache... In fact, this was our first time composing
for a silent film: with no dialogue, the soundtrack becomes one of the main narrative threads. That
freed us up, I think. The euphoric aspect of our score comes partly from that.
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Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Méliès thought of his film as a series of scenes: it’s practically filmed theatre. With that
static, vintage look, our music had to have dynamism, energy, modernity. Hence the importance we gave to
rhythms: the drum is what allows you to most easily date a piece of music, to anchor it in the contemporary
world.
From a technological point of view, the film brings together very primitive special effects, from
the stage or from painting, and the very latest restoration techniques. Your writing juxtaposes, in
the same way, the organic and the electronic, acoustic instruments and analog and digital effects.
Have you favoured one of these two approaches?
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: In our music the acoustic and the electronic have always lived together to try to surprise
and move the listener: the acoustic brings unctuosity and sincerity, while the electronic stimulates the imagination.
Nicolas Godin: A Trip to the Moon is undoubtedly more organic than most of our past projects. We wanted it to
sound «hand-made», knocked together, a bit like Méliès’ special effects. Everything is played live. We used
the mellotron for the sound effects, an ancestor of the synthesiser which you could find in all the English theatres:
like Méliès’ film, our soundtrack is nourished by living art. We also did a lot of work on wind. Afterwards,
it’s true that we like to play around with voices: we have no respect for them, we don’t have a sound
hierarchy. Here, it seemed interesting to us to make the humans talk with animal sounds (hens, elephants,
etc), the opposite of Disney productions, where animals talk like humans. This is particularly the case in the
astronomer sequence, where everyone is clucking as if in a hen-house: original ideas – to go to the moon – are
fought against by the crowd of right-minded people.
Your music is an admirable mix of differing moods, alternating between light and more melancholy
sequences.
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: We used classic film music techniques, like modulating harmonies. For example, when
the moon changes, the harmony changes. We really adapted ourselves to each scene of the film.
Nicolas Godin: For the very burlesque jumping scene on the moon, we imagined some fun music, a bit surf
and psychedaelic. But we also bore in mind that discovering a new territory often corresponds to the end of
a civilisation: that’s what happened with Christopher Colombus and it is I think, in places, what the film of
Méliès evokes.
Jean-Benoît Dunckel: Managing to balance the emotions is something that French musical composers, such
as Michel Colombier or Georges Delerue, more easily succeed in doing than the Americans.
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